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10. Total inclusion and access for all

John Worsfold, Dolphin Audio Publishing

I will try and give you a bit of history about Dolphin and who we are. We have heard a lot about broadband being a delivery mechanism for content, and we have heard about accessibility to that content. One of the things that has already been talked about is the speed of broadband over and above dial-up, and it is much more convenient to use broadband, but what is it you are actually accessing?

You may be accessing it quicker, but is it of any real use to you? You have to make sure that the content you can get to now very quickly is accessible.
It has to be accessible in a number of ways. It has to be accessible to you when you want it, in a form that you want it. I am going to talk a little bit about a player to play some content. We heard about DAISY from Jan-Ingvar Lindstrom earlier. Then we will talk about how we actually deliver the content.

Who is Dolphin? Dolphin Computer Access were established in 1986, so we have been around a little while in the software industry. They have over 60 employees worldwide and we are based in the UK with offices in the United States and Sweden. We are assistive technology specialists. Our main market is for the visually impaired, providing assistive technology for visually impaired and printing impaired. We provide accessibility software and we produce EaseReader, a screen reader and Braille output. This enables visually impaired and blind individuals to use a PC in the same way as you and I.

We also have an audio publishing division concerned with DAISY and the creation and delivery of accessible content. That is what we will talk about a little bit today.

What is DAISY? DAISY is an acronym standing for Digital Accessible Information SYstem. It started in 1993 or thereabouts, and it is a way of actually combining different media together in an accessible form. Using DAISY, you can create a structured, navigable piece of equipment that contains audio, text and images. It was originally devised with accessibility in mind and the consortium is currently made up of over 45 worldwide organisations. DAISY 2.02 is currently a worldwide standard and there is also an American equivalent, DAISY 3. There are currently more than 115,000 DAISY titles in the world today.

This has caught on. Why? Because it is now possible to deliver rich multimedia content that is synchronised which includes text, images and audio, in the form of a digital talking book. As the content is read - in other words, as you are listening to the audio - the text is highlighted in time with the audio visually and you can navigate around. You can move from sentence to sentence, or you can move within headings, pages or chapters. You are in control of the content.

Fig 10.1 EaseReader

Dolphin have developed a software player called Ease Reader, Fig 10.1. We have heard a bit today about creating or incorporating in the design process accessibility. Bearing in mind we work in the visually impaired market, we are very aware of the visually impaired needs, but the software player was designed to work in a commercial world as a commercial player, so it looks like a commercial player, in that it has a graphical interface, and yet it is completely accessible. It does not say, "I am an accessible product." It says, "I am a commercial product, with inbuilt accessibility if and when you need it." This helps with the inclusion. It means that different groups of people can use the same access technology, the same player and the same content, but use it in a different form.

What are the features of such a player? Mainstream accessible delivery. It is customisable. Even though a publisher may have created the content to look nice - for example, white Times Roman text on a black background, the user can change the visuals to suit their needs. They may want blue background with larger text, a different font or a different highlighter. You can use different styles and you have the audio built in to the content to start with.

You can speed up the playback. It is completely self-voiced. You do not necessarily need a screen reader to use the player. It is completely navigable, so you can move around the content when you want to. You can interact with the content. You can add bookmarks into the content. Everything you can do with a normal printed book you can do with the electronic document, and more. In the past, the electronic documents had less features or less rights than the hard copy. Now, all those rights and more, including the accessibility, is built into the content.

I am just going to quickly show you some content. I now have a document up on the screen, Fig 10.2.

Picture showing an extract from MacBeth.

Fig 10.2 Extract from MacBeth

I have a small extract of Macbeth, for example. "Thunder rumbles overhead. There is a mist hanging in the air..." It is human audio being played, but as it is being played the text is being highlighted in time with the audio. As a user, I can move through this content anywhere I like. I can manipulate the visuals. It is telling me, "Large style one". It is the same content.

Because I have images, I should be able to choose how I want to use the information. I may be quite happy to sit at home with the screen and assimilate the information, but if I have an MP3 player I can take the audio, put it on that and listen to it while I am on the train, or while I am walking the dog.

The point is that the web and broadband memory gives you access to information, but we need to build in the ability to access that information in the way we want to, when we want to. Just because we have a disability does not mean we want to access it in the same way all the time, so the content has to contain the components to allow you to do that.

Benefits. We can create rich media content that is completely accessible. We have multiple formats in one product supporting visually impaired and print impaired. It is completely navigable and searchable. We now have a searchable audio stream. You can have 20 hours` playback of audio, but you can search for the word "elephant" and find every occurrence of that word in the audio because the text is there, so it allows us to hook on and find it. It now means that you can gain access to specific bits of information.

The audio book industry tended to concentrate on works of leisure because that is how it was delivered. It was delivered in a linear playback form on audio cassette or CD. Now it can be works of reference. For example, Dolphin, together with the RNIB and BECTA, has created several national curriculum pieces of key stage 3 for schools. Trials have been conducted within schools to see how the kids liked this. Did it have benefit? I will come on to some of the findings in a minute.

It is an open source standard, which is very important. We are a commercial company and we have been there from the start. We have developed the playback and the tools, but this is an open standard. Anybody can go, look at the standard and create playback, authoring, delivery, or build on the standard. It is a standard that will not go away. It can be used in all market areas. I have shown you on Macbeth. It can work on anything where you need text and access: train timetables, utility bills, you name it. It is a more enjoyable experience and, because of that, you tend to get more engagement, so you tend to retain the information better.

Currently, this content tends to be delivered on CD, because there are hardware CD players that have been created to play back DAISY content. By compressing to MP3, you get 22 hours of audio on CD. This is exactly what AOL Time Warner did. They created the world's first commercial audio book, a work of fiction by James Patterson called The Jester. It sold in the States.

To give an idea of what they wanted to do, they had an audio book with 12 CDs. The 13th CD in a pack was a full audio text DAISY CD containing all those 12 CDs on one. It was sold in the States with no mention of accessibility at all. It is just another example of how accessibility features, if they are designed with the product in the early stages, can benefit everybody and still be accessible. Why do you have to say, "This has this accessibility feature". It should already be built in. Everybody should have access to the content. In recognition of that work, it received the Helen Keller Achievement Award this June in New York by the AFB.

So, in creating inclusion, we are creating choice. We are creating content as a single format, which is what publishers want to do. You want to produce the content once and not have to worry that you then have to transcribe it into some other form for another group. There is no discrimination. It is structured delivery, which means you choose where you want to move to. You can navigate around. There is legislative compliance under Section 508 of the DDA.

The RFB&D, covering the blind and dyslexic, did a study based on content. They found combined text and audio increased learning effectiveness by nearly 50%, just because of the text and audio. This was in secondary level students with mild disabilities. You see and you hear, or you can actually navigate this content as you wish to. That was quite amazing.

How do we create this type of content? We have created an authoring tool to called EasePublisher that enables you to create this type of content.

Fig 10.3 EasePublisher

The visuals are XHTML so content from the web can go inside a DAISY book. We have during today heard about flash and other inaccessible web elements that exist, so you have to be aware that anything you have to put inside or on a website, or deliver via broadband needs to be accessible. It has to be thought of in the first place, not as a retrofit, which does not necessarily work.

The features of the authoring tool. You can create synchronised text content. utilising synthesizers to generate the audio component. This process can be automated thus producing the content very quickly.

The National Library for the Blind, BT and ourselves are currently conducting doing a trial, producing content using different types of synthesizers to see what people will actually accept. Do people want human-sounding electronic synthesizers for leisure-type material? Would they prefer a more robotic sounding synthesizer for reference material because they want to speed that synthesizer up? When you think that this synthesised information can be created very quickly then it opens up other types of short self life content to the user like newspapers, newpapers that you can listen too, browse and search. The capabilities are endless. We can ignore the rest of the slide.

We talked about playing and creating the content. We talked about delivering the content. When we talk about delivering content via broadband, there are a number of scenarios. Again, we are trying to focus on the end user.

With a traditional web portal or web page, the producers decide what the information is going to be, or the publisher decides what information is presented to you and you navigate to it via links. But you can also use web technology to a greater effect and actually present the information pertinent to you in the form you want it.

We heard a bit about this from BT Yahoo, where you can personalise your home page. With this, you can personalise the information that is going to be presented to you, very much like you can set out your own channels, or the news or stocks and shares that you are interested in. For example, with Sky Plus, I believe you can record all the programmes you want and then come back and watch them when you like.

With News at Ten, I would normally have to sit through the whole of the News at Ten to find the bit I was interested in. If the accessibility features and the tagging was included within those programmes, I could search for the bit on David Beckham that I was interested in, and I would only be presented on that news portal with the interview concerned with David Beckham. I could ignore all the rest of the News at Ten. This is the sort of thing you could use it for.

Once that information is there on the web in an accessible form, we can choose to deliver it in the form we want. I could have it streamed to my pocket PC or hand-held device, or I could download it on to an audio device or print it out for Braille. You decide how you are going to assimilate that information, at the time you want it. You do not have to book it 15 months in advance because you want it in a certain form. It is there when you want it.

What effect will all this have? We can create accessible multimedia content, single format for all requirements, user defined content. You decide. The ability to insert and access content on a variety of devices, both static and portable. Total inclusion and independence.

What effect will all this have?

Fig 10.2 Effects of Easereader

The final statement I have, Fig 10.2 is that it is created once, for use when, where and in the form requird on a variety of devices, for both mainstream and disability groups.

NEW SPEAKER: It is nothing to do with me. I am just aware of it. I can't take any credit for it! It is something that I have seen and used. It is called Power Talk. It's freely available. If you go to Google and put in "Power Talk" or a site called "Speech Makers", you will go straight to a very usable installer, which will then install or download the programme "Power Talk" to your PC. You can use that to read any Powerpoint presentation. It`s good on the text. When you have embedded tables, you might have some difficulty in reading all the content of the tables, but it's free anyway.

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Last updated: 14.11.2007    © Copyright reserved